If you need a kick in the pants to start the new year, may I present Jacquie Berglund, CEO and, as she calls herself, “Rambunctious Social Entrepreneur,” at Finnegans Brew Co. I spent a delightful hour with her the other day at her stunning new brewhouse and taproom...
Letter From the Editor
The pipeline
Do you have a spare $50,000 or so to begin investing in early stage ventures? If so, would you know how to get started when you’re neither a powerhouse baby boomer nor a techie wunderkind, the two groups who dominate this scene? If you answered no to both questions,...
Knock it off
I have a challenge for my fellow baby boomers: Quit maligning the millennial generation. It seems to be a favorite pastime but it’s both unattractive and short-sighted. It happened again on a panel I attended recently at Faegre Baker Daniels law firm in Minneapolis,...
Letter from the Editor
After 32 years of marriage, I considered my husband and me a well-oiled machine, capable of handling the business of life with unspoken mastery and a clear delineation of duties. At dinner parties, I roast the prime rib; he makes the dessert. For household chores, I...
Resilience
LIKE MOST small-business owners who fought through the last recession, Lisa Hannum felt wrung out afterward. “I felt personally low energy. I felt something had to shift,” the founder of Beehive Strategic Communications told me. “I went on an extreme personal journey...
Ice floes
I got a smart speaker for Christmas and soon learned about all the amazing things it can do, like sync all my light fixtures, turn up the thermostat, mix a cocktail and shovel snow — I think, although I lost interest quickly when it turned out a few of those items...
From the East
At the risk of angering Goldy Gopher (my husband and I are both University of Minnesota alums and our son is a freshman there), I’ve got some wisdom from two restaurant founders to the east, who served on a founders’ panel I moderated recently at the Restaurant...
No Spiels
I get pitched all the time with story ideas, because what’s not to like about free publicity for your company? I’m sure you do, too, since everyone in business needs to sell something, and everyone in business probably has a 30-second elevator speech down pat. Three...
Editor’sNote
In a long career of editing and writing and, with Upsize, even co-founding a business publication, I have gotten a lot of feedback from readers. I enjoy every comment, which I keep in a special “hate mail/fan mail.” But I had never received a comment like this, from...
Get Out
That was the somewhat joking comment made by the moderator of a recent panel featuring four local entrepreneurs in digital publishing, who had interesting advice for business owners. Stephen Regenold of Minneapolis, founder of Gearjunkie.com, was the entrepreneur in...